UCS has fundamentally changed the way people will deploy and manage compute and networks. One key innovation is the VMFex. For now, the VMFex is compatible with vSphere and KMS. Support for Hyper-V is just around the corner, though for this discussion we’ll take a VMware centric view.

We have been planning a few large high density virtual desktop deployments lately for some banks and had to think carefully about how to scalability manage the networking. During the process we crystallised our thoughts around where and why Cisco are heading with FEX ports and we like the look of where its heading – its very elegant. It’s a long post but hang in there, there is lot of background that is important

Before we look at how UCS and VMFex is changing the way we look at networks, it’s worth looking back and reminding ourselves how virtualisation changed the network when VMware took over the data centre.

On the surface VMware’s Site Recovery Manager (SRM) is heaven sent bringing the promise of taking your servers running in production and getting them back up in a DR site in a mostly automated way. SRM does deliver on this promise but as we see all to often, it’s not as easy as it looks and some thoughtful planning is a must. This blog is about some key considerations you should make if, like most people, you have different subnets in use at your DR site and you are using SRM to change the IP address of your severs during failover.

DR sites are commonly using kit that has other primary uses, or is older, re-used ex-production kit. Typically, your DR site is going to offer lower performance. This is key for storage. While most companies are willing to take a performance and productivity hit in DR, recovery time objectives (RTO) are typically something that they aren’t willing to miss – when every hour of downtime costs money, getting those systems back online is critical. When you have low performance available from the storage, managing the load an SRM failover generates is key to having a successful recovery.

National Technologies Group launches NTGblog, a place to share information about the market, trends and, of course, our knowledge and experience accumulated during these 19 years in the field.

The idea is to gather our clients, partners, vendors and everyone else interested in an environment open to discuss technology. In this way, you will know us better and we will learn from you!

You can expect to read high quality articles written by our IT specialists. It will be about virtualizations, enterprise storage, data management and protection, infrastructure solutions, network system to mention a few.

And NTGblog is just one of the many actions aiming to develop closer relationship with you all. We are also active on Facebook, Twiiter, and Linked In. Take a minute and find us there!

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Managed IT Every business decision is made based on available capital. IT professionals--the good ones--can cost a lot of money, prompting many organizations to cut costs by simply going without hiring IT professionals. This presents another assortment of problems, as there is an inherent risk associated with not taking proper care of your technology assets. It also makes technology deployment considerably more difficult, if not impossible.

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Co-Managed IT Even if your business would rather have an internal IT department, you can still benefit greatly from outsourcing at least a portion of their responsibilities to a MSP. This is called co-managed IT, where your business still maintains an on-site IT staff while outsourcing the remainder of its responsibilities to a managed service provider. This solves a number of issues related to having an on-site IT department.

For example, the IT department of a small business is likely to have issues keeping up with maintenance, helping those in need of assistance, and implementing major projects. There’s just not enough time in the day to make all of this happen regularly. Through co-managed IT, you can outsource specific roles to National Technologies Group to ensure it all goes off without a hitch. The end result is a more focused in-house team that can handle their primary responsibilities while the rest is handled by trusted IT experts. To learn more, reach out to us at +61295186000.